NIH nurse practitioner chosen for Excellence in Nursing Award

Nancy Munro, an acute care nurse practitioner at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, is one of 10 recipients of Washingtonian magazine's 2011 Excellence in Nursing Award.

"It’s really a great honor," Munro said of the award. "I love being a nurse. It is so satisfying when you can help someone understand or deal with their disease."

Munro is the senior nurse practitioner in the Critical Care Medicine Department and on the Pulmonary Consult Service. She earned a bachelor’s in nursing from Villanova University, Philadelphia, and a master's in nursing at Emory University, Atlanta. Munro got her acute care nurse practitioner certificate in 1997 from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., just as the field was emerging. She was the first nurse practitioner on the Surgical Critical Care Service at Washington Hospital Center and then worked at Inova Alexandria Hospital before joining the NIH Clinical Center in 2004.

"Nancy Munro brings to the Washington, D.C., medical community leadership in clinical care for our sickest patients, leadership in training a relatively new category of health care provider, and scholarship to the intensive care unit that enhances the quality of our workforce and our patient care," wrote Henry Masur, M.D., chief of the Critical Care Medicine Department, in Munro's nomination.

In addition to her full-time position at the Clinical Center, Munro is a clinical instructor in the Acute Care Nursing Practitioner/Clinical Nurse Specialist Graduate Program at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore.

She has made significant contributions to the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, serving on the group's national board of directors and chairing various work groups that wrote standards for care delivery and identified important education topics.

This year marks the first Excellence in Nursing Awards from Washingtonian. Munro and her fellow recipients will be honored at a dinner in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 7.

The NIH Clinical Center (CC) is the clinical research hospital for the National Institutes of Health. Through clinical research, clinician-investigators translate laboratory discoveries into better treatments, therapies and interventions to improve the nation's health. For more information, visit http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov/.

NIH nurse practitioner chosen for Excellence in Nursing Award, November 29, 2011 News Release - National Institutes of Health (NIH)